Thursday, August 02, 2012

A couple returned to their home in Colorado after several months’ absence and discovered that squatters had taken up residence there after purchasing a fraudulent “deed of adverse possession” for the property. The rightful owners, however, learned that they could not evict the squatters, because the latter had declared bankruptcy.

In other news, the U.S. Army is spending $171 million to buy Russian Mi-17 helicopters for the Afghan military. One of the primary reasons the Mi-17 is said to be suitable is that Afghan pilots are more familiar with it than other helicopters.

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Concerning the couple that came back to their home and found that squatters were living in it:

The law bends over backwards to protect people in bankruptcy. This is good as far as it goes, but in this case, it was the responsible couple, the one that actually owned the house and maintained the payments, that suffered. The Mexican couple thought they could obtain a good house in Colorado, with no obligations, for $5000, and expect sympathy because they got taken.

Why is this case of interest to anti-jihadists? Because the government continually seems to separate people from the consequences of their decisions. This "magical" thinking extends to immigration, where the government operates under the delusion that you can import millions of people dedicated to totalitarian, religious government, and that somehow they will change. Or, that you can import millions of people from a society with gang warfare, chronic lawlessness, and ritualized murder, and that somehow magically they will change.

Similarly, the government looks at people's plight, rather than how their own decisions and actions landed them there. In this case, you have a couple scraping by on the margins, but maintaining their payments, displaced by squatters whose only claim is an inability to recover from their decision to trust a crook who promised them something for nothing.

The purpose of government is to encourage civil, responsible behavior by linking actions to consequences. In the case of both immigration and property rights, any attempt to decouple actions from consequences is doomed to failure and disaster.